Nablus
- With a length of 45 kilometers and a height of 9 meters, the Israeli occupation began on Wednesday the construction of a huge concrete wall around the "Salem" area near the city of Jenin in the northern West Bank, and provided it with protection equipment and modern surveillance technology.
He says that it is a "security obstacle" to prevent Palestinians from entering "smuggling" into Israel.
With this wall, the rest of the lands of Salem - on whose isolated lands one of the largest Israeli camps is being built in the occupied territories in 1948 - will join dozens of Palestinian areas and villages that the Israeli occupation army has turned into isolated towns from their surroundings in the West Bank, and caused policies of expulsion and displacement under pressure. livelihood of its inhabitants.
A cement wall surrounds an insulating fence that the Israeli occupation began to erect to isolate more lands of Salem village, west of Jenin (communication sites)
The wall.. isolated cantons
Palestinian institutions monitor 190 villages, towns and population centers that are isolated and affected by the Israeli annexation and expansion wall, including 40 completely isolated communities, known as “seam villages” with the “green line” (the armistice line separating the borders of Palestine occupied in 1948 and the occupied territories in 1967).
The area of what Israel has isolated and plans to isolate and annex through its apartheid wall is estimated at 560,000 dunams (dunam = one thousand square meters) of the West Bank’s lands estimated at 5,654 square kilometers, which is equal to 22% of the area of historical Palestine.
In June 2002, Israel began building the wall of annexation and racist expansion, as it extends from the north of the West Bank to its south, and 443 square kilometers out of more than 715 kilometers the occupation plans to build, and took the form of a "zigzag snake", gnaws the largest amount of land.
It extends between areas narrowing to 60 meters and expanding to 150 meters in circumference on both sides, and with a height of up to 9 meters of cement.
In some areas, it takes the form of an electronic barbed wire fence, which is being dispensed with later in cement construction.
The wall extends around isolated towns and villages, at different distances;
Around Jerusalem and its suburbs it extends 96 km, in Hebron 64 km, Bethlehem 25 km, Ramallah about 9 km, Salfit 27 km, and in Qalqilya, Tulkarm and Jenin it extends at a distance of 58 km for each area, as these areas are located on the contact lines with the line the green.
In Jericho, in the southeast of the West Bank, the occupation did not build the wall, but it cut it with a deep network of bypass roads designated for settlers, which turned it into an isolated city.
There he also confiscated 140 square kilometers of the territorial waters of the Dead Sea, and took control of 160 kilometers of the Palestinian border with Jordan.
These numbers reflect - according to Qassem Awad, a settlement expert and former documentation official at the Palestinian Authority for Resistance of the Wall and Settlement (affiliated with the Palestinian Authority) - "the settlement project in the West Bank and Jerusalem, whose stages are based on isolating each governorate over the other, and even isolating each governorate from its villages and towns." .
An electronic wall surrounds the lands of the village of "Dahr Al-Malih" near the city of Jenin in the northern West Bank (Al-Jazeera)
A prison within a prison
To the west of the city of Jenin, the village of "Zahr al-Malih" lives this exact reality, its suffering is compounded by the wall and the settlement surrounding it, and it is waiting for the most difficult after the occupation confiscated two-thirds of its lands estimated at 1,020 dunums.
And paid 400 of its residents to live in less than 60 dunums.
The village is surrounded by 4 Israeli settlements, inhabited by about 3,000 settlers, which are "Shakeed, Hananit, Rihan and Tel Manshi", in addition to a camp for the occupation army and a school for settlers.
Around it, the occupation deploys its military checkpoints, such as the “Tora” and “Barta’a” checkpoints, which increase the siege of the village, especially by restricting the time of entry and exit for citizens from seven in the morning until nine in the evening, and through special permits that the occupation renews once every 4 years.
The residents of Dahr al-Malih hardly receive basic services such as water and electricity. As for the school, it was another dream that came true 3 years ago and included only 7 classes, and its students are forced to complete their studies in the neighboring villages.
Omar al-Khatib, a former official in the village council of "Dahr al-Malih", says that they pay daily the tax of their presence here, not only from their land;
Rather, from their freedom and their most basic life rights, by isolating them from their Palestinian environment and limiting their social contact.
The occupation in this village limits the people’s food and drink requirements. They are prohibited from entering a full box of vegetables or fruits, and this is limited to kilos only, and even the transportation of their household appliances such as the refrigerator, for example, requires prior coordination, “and this may take a whole month.”
All of these measures led dozens of residents from Dhahr al-Malih to build and live outside to escape the daily inconveniences of the occupation.
In recent years, more than 40 families have resorted to building outside the village.
Settlement.. another woe
The occupation does not only target the "seam villages" with the wall that threatens their survival and surrounds them from the west, but also the settlement - from the east towards the depth of the West Bank - increases their siege and narrows their areas.
The occupation seeks to turn the West Bank into a military barracks and a group of isolated ghettos that are not geographically continuous and connected through a network of tunnels and bridges that are completely under its control.
This division is based on more than 500 military and settlement occupation sites on the occupied territories in 1967, including 165 outposts (settlement nuclei) and 177 existing settlements, in addition to 94 Israeli army camps, 700 military checkpoints and 60 gates that penetrate the wall.
This reality serves 700,000 settlers spread in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Like "Zahr al-Maleh", the "Arab Abu Farda" and "Arab al-Ramadin" communities, in which 800 Palestinians live near the city of Qalqilya in the northern West Bank, face the threat of deportation, not by isolating them behind the wall, but by confiscating their lands for the benefit of the "Alfei Menashe" colony, which is inhabited by 2,000 settlers. Land equal to the same area in which more than 60 thousand Palestinians live in the city of Qalqilya.
In the south, 17 villages surrounding Jerusalem face east and north;
The same fate of isolation and siege behind the wall, and the occupation tightens the noose on the 70,000 people living in it with its military measures.
Palestinians pass through military checkpoints and gates to reach their lands (Al-Jazeera)
forced expulsion
In the areas that Israel isolates through the wall and paralyzes the movement of its people, as is the case with “seeking villages”, the occupation is based on the laws of some of them from the Ottoman era, especially the “wasteful land” law;
To confiscate it under the pretext of not reclaiming it, after preventing its owners for years from accessing it, cultivating it or building on it.
Expert Qassem Awad says, "With the security control over all lands in the West Bank, the Palestinian loses freedom of movement and control over the economic resources necessary for demographic growth. Instead of working on an agricultural project on a land of 200 acres, people are looking here for a narrow space in which to build a vertical house for themselves and their children."
"All these are repulsive and coercive factors imposed by the occupation to push the Palestinians to leave their land," he added.
Israel aims to displace the population by encircling villages and regions and isolating them from their Palestinian surroundings on both sides (inside Palestine occupied in 1948 and the West Bank) to facilitate the annexation of its lands to it and its settlement projects, in addition to that it acquires strategic areas, whether in terms of geographical locations or what it contains of huge natural resources The most important of them are the water basins scattered along the wall in the west of the occupied West Bank.